Fibre-optic cabling into the home means a range of new digital services could be delivered straight to your door, writes DICK AHLSTROM
THE INFORMATION highway has just got that little bit faster with the development of what is being described as the world’s most advanced digital information network.
Based on the use of fibre-optic cabling that runs right into the home, it will be able to carry vastly more information than today’s most modern systems.
University College Cork’s Tyndall National Institute has been deeply involved in the 3½-year research project which has only recently concluded. It will mean that a whole range of new digital services could be delivered directly to your door, explains Tyndall’s Prof Paul Townsend.
Most homes receive phone, television, broadband and other services via copper cables, but copper can’t carry the volumes of data that fibre optic cables can. Yet the delivery of what is know as a “fibre-to-the- home” network has – until now – been a costly business because of inefficiencies inherent in the wider fibre optic network.
This may now all change as a result of the Pieman research project, an EU-funded research collaboration involving project co- ordinator BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Centre for Integrated Photonics Ltd, Ghent University and Tyndall.
The research partners have developed a whole new range of photonic devices that make the delivery of a fibre optic network far cheaper than in the past, Prof Townsend says. “It takes fibre directly to the home user.”
Pieman stands for Photonic Integrated Extended Metro and Access Network and received EU support under its “broadband for all” strategic objective. The goal was to develop more efficient ways to produce, send and receive wholly optical signals to carry digitised information, for example phone, television signals, internet access and even services such as films on demand and live, high-speed game playing.
Prof Townsend says the delivery of a working demonstration network in the Tyndall lab showed that the collaborators managed to achieve this goal. Minister of State for Science, Technology and Innovation Conor Lenihan paid a visit to Tyndall recently to see the new network in action.
Being able to bring optical cabling directly into the home is a departure for Europe generally, Prof Townsend says. “At the moment, optical fibre is used in the long-haul network and in metro areas.”
The optical fibre gets close to the end user but ends up a few metres short, given that copper cabling typically completes the connection to a home.
Fibre optic has enormous band width or information-carrying capacity however, and so cutting out the copper would bring immediate benefits. Existing support technology was an impediment however, for example the necessity of building a major switching node every 20 km or so to get the optical signals into the home.
The Pieman project was set up to overcome these difficulties and make fibre-to-the-home a reality within Europe.
“What Pieman is trying to do is reduce the overall cost of the network by eliminating these extra nodes,” Prof Townsend says. “We have developed new types of photonic components and a new network architecture.”
For starters, the research collaborators managed to reduce the number of switching nodes by finding new ways to extend the span between them from 20km to 100km.
They have also greatly increased the number of customers that can be handled by a given node, boosting this from about 32 to 512, and with even newer technology to a possible 16,000 customers with each node.
Then there are the data transfer speeds. Copper broadband connections and even wireless might give you a few megabits a second, but with optical fibre coming straight into the home, you can expect transfer rates of about 10 gigabits a second, 10,000 times faster than existing connections.
Building an efficient and much lower cost network was the hard part. Connecting it once in the home and finding uses for it are by comparison a snap.
“The key thing is the optical fibre comes all the way into the house and just connects into a box,” Prof Townsend says. This will give access to the phone network, tv cable and other services, and the fibre cable could in theory be laid throughout the house to provide full services to every room.
Tyndall tackled several parts of the overall project, he says. It was involved in designing the overall network architecture and then built a mock-up demonstration model in its Cork labs to show that it all worked. They also developed some of the devices needed to make the improvements in the system.
Fibre-to-the-home barely exists in Europe but is developing quickly elsewhere. Japan now uses fibre optic almost exclusively in refit and new build and has at least 14 million homes connected this way. South Korea is also rapidly expanding its fibre optic network. The US has also started to go fibre, with one big company, Verizon, working exclusively with the delivery of fibre optic-based services.
Prof Townsend believes that Europe will also begin switching over soon. “Fibre-to-the- home is really happening now.”
